Comcast,
NBC Universal and the Question of Net Neutrality
When
it was announced in late September 2010 that Jeff Zucker, CEO of NBC
Universal, would be leaving the media giant he had worked for since
1986, the news was met with almost unanimous applause. Zucker is a villainized
individual within the television industry and is seen as the man who
single-handedly brought the number one network in the country down to
the bottom of the pile. Under Zucker, NBC fell from first to fourth,
mainly because of his inability to find successful television shows
when series like Friends and ER came to an end or
started to show their age. More recently, he was the one responsible
for the Jay Leno-Conan O’Brien debacle which only added to the
laughing-stock image of the company that he was charged with running.
“There’s
a certain amount of responsibility that comes when one runs a media
company,” Ari Greenburg, an agent at William Morris, told The
Hollywood Reporter. “They set the tone for
the pop culture for the country. Pop culture is our number one export.
Zucker took the single most important piece of real estate on NBC—and
TV in general—and reprogrammed it with a reality series. It never
recovered.” The piece of real estate Greenburg referred to was
the coveted 9 p.m. time slot on Thursday nights, once the home of a
“Must See TV” lineup that extends from the 1980s and Cheers
all the way to Seinfeld, which was given to Donald Trump and
The Apprentice in 2004.
Zucker’s
demise comes at the hands of Comcast, the cable provider that is on
the verge of completing its merger with NBC Universal. Apparently the
company is not interested in merely owning its own television network,
but wants to own a successful one as well. Optimism for NBC’s
future was bolstered even further when word began to circulate a few
weeks after the Zucker announcement that Comcast was interested in having
Robert Greenblatt, the man responsible for turning Showtime into a legitimate
rival to HBO, take the reigns of NBC.
“It’s
spectacular,” television agent Debbee Klein remarked
in regards to the news. “They haven’t had an executive of
his stature since Grant Tinker and Brandon Tartikoff. The writing community
would make NBC a must-stop destination if he’s at the helm.”
While the
inevitable changes within NBC Universal due to the pending merger have
been met with enthusiasm and praise, there are still many individuals
who are apprehensive about Comcast and its designs in general. Like
all cable providers, the company has been concerned in recent years
by the increasing number of television viewers who have turned to the
Internet to watch video and what that might mean for the industry. Why
pay for cable, after all, when you can watch your favorite shows via
the World Wide Web? To combat such a scenario, Comcast teamed up with
Time-Warner in July 2009 to launch “TV Everywhere.” The
idea was to provide free access to certain premium content, including
television shows and movies, but only to subscribers of Comcast, Time-Warner
and any other company willing to join in on the experiment.
Some consider
“Television Everywhere” as just a first step to Comcast
erasing the competition and controlling access to online video. In her
September 2010 article “Comcast’s NBC-U Dreams May Be Online
Video’s Nightmare” on GigaOm,
Susan Crawford argues that Comcast is currently positioning itself as
the only major player in the market when it comes to providing the type
of high speed Internet access necessary for watching video and that
if it succeeds, that could spell disaster for the online video industry.
“Imagine
a big pipe coming into everyone’s house in a given market area
controlled by one actor,” she writes. “Now imagine that
you want to aim an online business—particularly an online video
business—at that area. You’ll be subject to the whims of
the carrier, and there will be no countervailing force to protect your
ability to reach your customers. Maybe a small portion of that pipe
will be reserved for traditional Internet access, but maybe not, and
what’s reserved won’t be very fast or very standardized.”
How could
such a scenario play out? Without government regulation or restrictions,
Comcast could conceivably manipulate the speed of Internet access in
regards to specific sites. Online video destinations, for instance,
that carry Comcast content could be given higher speeds and download
priorities compared to those that do not, causing web surfers to choose
the higher speed sites due to the relative ease of viewing content.
It is also conceivable that Comcast could turn the Word Wide Web into
the online equivalent of cable where video aggregators like KoldCast
and Next New Networks would have to pay a fee to Comcast in order to
have their websites accessed by Comcast subscribers. Comcast could even
set up pricing tiers where customers would have to pay a higher premium
in order to access those sites. Any scenario of course means that new
and independent online video providers would have to “play nice”
with Comcast as the company would hold the keys to the Internet Kingdom.
“I
don’t like the phrase ‘net neutrality’ any more than
you do,” Susan Crawford concludes at the end of her article. “How
about ‘the ability to compete’? How about a standard interface
for everything new you’re building? The cable companies have figured
out that there is nothing stopping them, and their business plans may
not mesh with yours. Especially if you’re not yet one of the other
media conglomerates—and even they may be worried at this point.”
The phrase
“net neutrality” that Crawford alludes to is the ongoing
battle between Internet providers and the US Government. Theoretically,
the regulation of the World Wide Web falls under the jurisdiction of
the Federal Communications Commission but that authority has been undermined
by recent federal court ruling stating otherwise. To correct this, supporters
of net neutrality—which generically means that Internet users
should have unfettered access to legal content and services on the World
Wide Web—believe Congress must pass legislation turning the concept
into law and granting the FCC the power to enforce it.
In April
2008, WGA-West president Patric Verrone and actress Justine Bateman
appeared before the Senate Commerce Committee in support of net neutrality.
According to Variety
at the time, the two “described the Internet as the only remaining
open market for truly independent creators” and argued that a
major studio could potentially contract with a service provider and
block websites it deemed as competitors, especially independents who
do not have the financial and political clout of the majors, if regulations
were not put in place.
“I
started working in the entertainment industry 22 years ago,” Verrone
stated. “Almost thirty separate companies independently produced
and distributed television on the ‘new media’ of cable TV.
Today we are down to about seven vertically integrated conglomerates,
controlling not only cable TV, but also broadcast, film and even news.”
Most analysts
agree that it was the repealing of the Fin-Syn Rules—which prevented
television networks from owning the content that they aired—in
the 1980s that caused the demise of independents. Since the networks
owned the method of distribution, the ability to produce their own content
effectively enabled them to squeeze out the little guy. “The axiom
in Hollywood is that content is king, but those who control access to
the king, control the kingdom,” Verrone added. “Because
of federal regulations—or lack thereof—that control is in
the hands of neither the consumer nor the content creators, but the
distributors.”
None of
this is to suggest that a Comcast takeover of the Internet and all of
its online video options is imminent. Comcast’s purchase of NBC
Universal may indeed turn out to be the best thing to happen to the
megamedia giant and the cable provider may simply be interested in turning
“the peacock into a proud peacock” again, as one industry
insider told The Hollywood Reporter. It could even be that
Comcast recognizes the switch by consumers away from cable and to the
Internet and is merely diversifying itself in order to compensate for
any potential drop in regards to it television subscription revenues.
Then again,
maybe not. As author Amanda Lotz points out in her book, The Television
Will Be Revolutionized, “All too frequently emergent technologies
provided multiplicity and diversity in their infancy, only to be subsumed
by dominant and controlling commercial interests as they became more
established.” Who’s to say the same isn’t about to
hold true for the World Wide Web?
Anthony
Letizia (October 11, 2010)
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